What Georgia enacted instead

We searched the full enacted text of the Georgia Property Owners' Bill of Rights Act for any training obligation. There is none. Act 715 contains no board-training requirement, no education hours, no certification and no competency condition on serving as a director.

What it does contain, at § 43-17A-7(9), is an owner's right to “expect, unless otherwise provided by the laws of this state, that a director of an owners' association board of directors shall perform his or her duties in good faith and with the degree of care an ordinary, prudent person in a like position would exercise under similar circumstances” — and at (10), a right to expect conflict-of-interest disclosure between directors.

That is a restatement of the standard of care Georgia's nonprofit corporation code already applies. It is a description of the duty, not a means of equipping anybody to perform it.

Why the training argument keeps coming back

Because the documented Georgia failures of 2025-2026 are, disproportionately, failures a trained board would have caught. Consider what surfaced in the same two years:

• An association in Dacula reportedly collected close to $200,000 in fines against a budgeted $40,000 in fine revenue between January and Halloween 2025 — a five-fold overshoot that turns a deterrent into a revenue line.
• A Conyers association paid a $40,000 settlement over a lien for under $3,000 in fines, with $7,000 of its own legal fees appearing in the community budget.
• A treasurer in Carrollton and a president in South Fulton were each charged over association funds — matters that turn on the absence of ordinary financial controls.
• The Court of Appeals refused an association's entire attorney-fee claim because its invoices showed rates inconsistent with its own supporting affidavit.

None of those is a case of a board acting in bad faith about the law. They are cases of boards not knowing what the law required.

The training question is now urgent for a different reason

This is the part that makes SB 393's death more consequential than it looked in March.

On 1 January 2027, Georgia volunteer boards acquire a set of obligations most of them have never had: a state registration to file and renew, a ten-year records-retention duty at a Georgia office, a statutorily mandated order for applying owner payments, a flat prohibition on accelerating assessments, a complaint process with an automatic collection stay, and — already live — a certified-mail notice and itemisation gate before any attorney's fee can be collected.

The state is imposing all of that on unpaid volunteers and providing no training, no manual and, as yet, no rules. SB 393 would have supplied a four-hour introduction at state expense. It was tabled.

What fills the gap

In the absence of a statute, three sources, none of them free of interest:

• Management companies and association counsel, who have every commercial reason to explain the new obligations and are also the parties whose fees the new law constrains.
• CAI's own education programmes, which are substantial — and which come from the organisation that campaigned for a veto of the statute being taught.
• Homeowner advocacy groups, which are strong on owner rights and thin on the mechanics of running an association.

Georgia does license community association managers, through the Georgia Real Estate Commission. It imposes nothing on the volunteer directors who employ them.

What to watch next

Whether a training bill returns in 2027 — and whether it returns attached to something. A standalone training mandate has now failed once without a hearing. The version likelier to move is one folded into a technical-corrections bill for Act 715, where the argument is not “boards could be better” but “boards must now do six new things and nobody has told them how.”